


Amchitka

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Environmentalism, M/M, Nuclear Weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24537949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: “We’re going ahead as planned,” Remus said. “You probably don’t want to be in the blast zone. Over.”written in 2017
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Amchitka

The radio crackled. It was the boy again. “We’re coming for you,” he said. “Over.”

“We’re going ahead as planned,” Remus said. “You probably don’t want to be in the blast zone. Over.”

“You wouldn’t detonate it,” said the boy. He sounded, for the first time in their three-day CB acquaintance, a bit nervous. Their little boat was coming up through the inside passage probably from Seattle or some bougie Vancouver neighborhood like Kitsilano or South Cambie, and Remus had entertained the notion that the boy, and indeed no one else on the boat, had never been at sea for so long before. Anyway he went on: “You wouldn’t detonate it if you knew someone was close. Over.”

This in fact was true. Remus had studied closely what had happened with Albert Bigelow and Earle and Barbara Reynolds sailing ketches into Bikini Atoll. But all that was up to the Atomic Energy Commission, by whom Remus was not technically employed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Anyway it isn’t me who makes that call. Over.”

“What exactly do you do? Over.”

Remus put the mouthpiece down and ran a hand through his hair and poured himself another finger of whiskey. But then the voice came again. “Come in, Amchitka. What exactly do you do? Over.”

“I’m a scientist.”

“For the AEC?”

“From the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I’m a biologist.”

“So you’re a traitor.” Remus shot back the whiskey and poured another finger. It was getting to be winter and already outside there wasn’t much light. It was just a kind of grimy, gummy film on the horizon, and something about it was illicit, like old neon. “You’re a traitor to whatever animals you study. And you’re a traitor to all your fellow Alaskans.”

For a while Remus’s hand hovered over the knob that would tune the radio to another channel. But he hesitated and in the hesitation —

“How dare you,” said the boy. “If the fault goes — ”

“Are you from Alaska, and were you here when it went then?” There was a thin, muted crackle on the line. “Come in, you fucker,” Remus said.

“I’m — no.” There was a long pause. Then, idiotically, the boy said, “Over.” Probably he had never used a CB radio either, Remus was thinking, somewhere in the razor-thin verge between exasperation and venomous anger. Drinking, especially as heavily as he had been drinking since he had come to Amchitka, had shortened his fuse substantially, not that it had ever been particularly long to begin with. “I’m from Victoria,” said the boy, though he’d said his transmission was over. “We felt it a little. Over.”

This was so pathetically idiotic that Remus got up out of the chair and went to his bedroll for the cigarettes. He thought about going outside to smoke one but it was frigid cold and his long underwear was still wet from crouching in the ocean to make measurements in the scant stretch of daylight. And anyway he was supposed to be manning the radio, because he was also supposed to receive a transmission, in a quarter hour’s time, from the head of his department in Fairbanks.

“Amchitka, do you read — ”

“I’m here,” Remus said. “I study subtidal organisms. Mostly sea urchins.”

“Whyever would you study _them_.”

Remus had stepped on one as a child on the coast in Cordova. The spines had been so deeply embedded in his foot that his parents had had to bring him to the doctor. Since then he had admired the creatures for their tenacity. But it would not do to tell the boy this over the CB radio.

“How old are you?” said the boy.

“Twenty-two. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

So he wasn’t really a boy. Even though it seemed wrong, by the tone of his voice, to refer to him as a man.

“You were in the earthquake then,” said the voice. “And you were — ”

“I was fourteen. I was from — well, it’s gone now. This town called Portage.”

He could remember sometimes in the oddest dreams running up the hill away from the wave toward the white eye of the sun or God stretched everpresent and unseeing through the dirty grey cotton clouds.

“Aren’t you afraid it might happen again?”

“It didn’t last time.”

“Well the bomb is five times stronger this time.”

As though Remus did not intimately know this. “It won’t happen,” he said.

“How can you be sure?”

Faith, he almost said. It won’t — it can’t. As though he had any kind of even apocryphal proof that God cared enough to prevent it from happening once more in his own lifetime.

“The fifteenth most powerful earthquake of all time happened right there,” the voce went on. “Right where you’re sitting. 8.7 magnitude on the Richter Scale, and an eleven-meter run-up on Shemya — ”

“Nobody died in that one,” Remus reminded him.

“So, it’s the same fault that runs toward Prince William Sound,” said the voice. “You never know, you know, how much it might — ”

“I know,” Remus reminded him, “I do know.” He poured himself another finger of whiskey and mulled over his last cigarette. The silence on the line was weighty and insistent as the sea. “I don’t fucking understand,” he said finally. “What do you want from me? I’m here to study sea urchins. They’re evacuating me tomorrow in advance of the test.”

“Can’t you — what about some clever sabotage?”

This was comically ridiculous. “I’m a fucking biologist,” Remus reminded him. “I saw them putting the warhead in the shaft and it looked like science fiction.”

It reminded me, he did not say, could not say, had been drinking toward now for a few years, it reminded me loudly and without recompense that I am altogether unsure if there is any place at all for me (Alaskan biology student, son of huntsmen and -women having wandered on the wild moors through the darkest of all nights and dead now seven years, survivor of the second largest earthquake in recorded history, inheritor of assorted colonial processes unconscionable) in this New Atomic World…

The radio fuzzed. “Lupin?” said a more familiar voice. “Come in, Lupin…”

It was his professor from Fairbanks. He hated the sensation of disappointment twisting with the whiskey in his gut. They spoke for a while about the sea urchins and assorted other measurements Remus had taken on the condition of the subtidal flora and fauna. His professor reminded him that he would be airlifted off Amchitka with the rest of the scientific staff early the following morning in advance of the detonation of the Cannikin warhead, which was scheduled for twenty-two-hundred hours. When his professor at last told him “Over and out,” Remus wandered through the tunings on the CB radio for another hour or so, steadily drinking, searching for the other voice in a kind of steadily constricting pressure, as though if he did not find this voice someone (perhaps himself) might die.

In the morning he woke at the desk with a hot railroad spike of a hangover steadily driving into his skull through his left eye, to the sound of the helicopter pilot knocking on his trailer door. He watched the test on the fuzzy TV that evening from his garrett room in Fairbanks. Trudged back to the lab on campus at midnight in the gathering snow to record into the official registers the necessary data from Amchitka. Slept there, most nights, for a long time. Understood distantly in the recesses of his very soul that one day he would have to go back there to take more measurements and that perhaps when he did something might be found, though who could say exactly what this was, and to whom such findings might bear significance.

–-

Years later he was in Vancouver for a conference on echinoderms at UBC. After a panel on sand dollars’ exposure to radioactive material he found himself deep in conversation with an old mentor from Humboldt State University, with whom he had slept twice regrettably; he had a feeling it was heading for a perhaps even more regrettable third, and then, thankfully, they were approached by a hippie type who had tied back his long hair, which anyway he looked too old for, who introduced himself with a too-firm clammy handshake, and who said his name was Sirius Black.

“Dearborn,” said the Humboldt State professor manfully. “And this is Lupin, from Fairbanks.”

“I enjoyed the panel,” said Sirius Black, and thence came the voice. Time and space shifted under Remus’s feet with the percussive, violent gravity of the Pacific Plate on March 27, 1964.

They walked out together down University Boulevard away from the campus toward the forest and the beach. “It’s depressing really,” said Sirius Black. “I gave up all my idealism and became a scientist.”

“A scientist of what?”

“Physics. Reactivity. First it was sort of like a know your enemy thing.”

“And then what was it?”

“I don’t know,” said Sirius Black. “Something different. Have you got a cigarette?” Remus had only one left and they walked sharing it down the long path above the beach. “Anyway I’m here at the university. I saw the topic of the panel and figured it was worth a shot.”

It was almost aggressively not, _I’ve thought of you_.

“Besides it was sort of related. I’m interested in how other sorts of living beings process radiation poisoning. In fact, it’s — well my advisor was telling me it should be my dissertation. But I haven’t taken biology since grade school.”

“I’ll write something with you,” Remus said without thinking.

“Will you?”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ve just finished a paper. I was going to take some time to just — but I don’t even know what I’ll do.”

“Sail around the world,” said Sirius.

“What? No…”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how to sail.”

“That’s a bullshit reason. That’s no reason at all. Can’t you learn?”

He laughed. He didn’t make a habit of doing this very often and it tasted in the back of his throat like sun or like the chorus of voices at the end of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “I don’t know,” he said.

“If I were you I wouldn’t be afraid of anything anymore. You survived a 9.2-magnitude earthquake, and you watched the AEC prepare and execute three nuclear warhead tests.”

“I was drunk for most of the latter,” Remus admitted.

“I couldn’t tell. On the radio.”

“I’m shocked by that. I never — I mean I don’t talk to people like that, not usually. Probably it was just, it was only your voice. Not your face. It didn’t feel quite real. And the sun was only out like three hours a day. And I was drinking really quite a lot. Too much.”

“Have you stopped now?”

Remus had tried about twenty times. “It’s harder than it seems,” he said.

They walked to the quiet residential neighborhood of doctoral candidate housing in which Sirius lived in a surprisingly well-maintained bungalow in the perpetual shade of ancient pines. The walls of his suite were hung with psychedelic posters from Summer of Love concerts and tours gone by and one of them was signed by Jerry Garcia. To wit, Sirius put Patti Smith’s “Land” on the stereo. He offered Remus a gin and tonic, which he made with too much lime squeezed directly into the fingerprinted jam jars in a strong fist. Remus was watching out the window at the trees moving in the breeze and the distant sea, visible here as a strip of silver like a dropped chain.

Eventually, three or four drinks and two more Patti Smith albums deep, they found there was nothing left to talk about and nothing left to do but the obvious. Sirius kissed with far too many teeth, like perhaps more teeth than humans should even have, and he was extraordinarily talkative in a way that shouldn’t’ve been surprising. Remus had walked out on lovers for less and yet bore it silently until he couldn’t take it silently anymore. Sirius bit the join of his neck and shoulder so he elbowed Sirius in the gut. They wrestled for a while in attempt to delineate dominance practically and then they lay on the lumpy duvet gasping for breath and at last attempted it again.

Sometime in the middle of the night Sirius woke him coming back to bed from turning off the record player, which had been shuffling back and forth against the playout groove. The moon was coming through the Venetian blinds onto the sheets in stripes of bright paint. “Will you go back there,” Sirius said, kneeling in the bed.

Remus yawned. “Where?”

“To Amchitka.”

“I have to. Measurements.”

“Do you have any idea what — ”

“No — God. I’m terrified to see. Actually mostly terrified maybe you were right all those years ago.”

“About what?”

“Being a traitor.”

“Well you wouldn’t be alone.”

Remus sighed. He was sore and his head hurt from drinking. “I guess not,” he said.

They smoked a joint together, sitting in the bed, and watched the dawn. When the sky had filled with grey Sirius kissed him very tenderly as though trying to draw very old words from his mouth. At noon he drove Remus to the airport. On the plane back to Fairbanks Remus fell asleep and dreamed for the thousandth time about running up the hill toward the sun. Upon arrival back at the university he found his advisor scheduling the department’s return to Amchitka.

**Author's Note:**

> now that i have your attention for posting an r/s story for the first time in two and a half years, i'm doing an [ongoing fundraising drive](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/619864266613407744/yeats-infection-yeats-infection) for organizations on the front line of the racial justice movement right now. if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will - yes, i WILL write r/s again if you ask nicely and give $$$ - please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something. 
> 
> this was originally [posted on tumblr](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/164503659605/2-for-kindly-philanthropist-floraldamerons-here) in august 2017 in exchange for [floraldamerons'](https://floraldamerons.tumblr.com/) support of local anti-racist organizations after the events in charlottesville, virginia. this story is based on the actual [amchitka nuclear tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amchitka) which inspired the birth of greenpeace, and the catastrophic [alaska earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Alaska_earthquake) of 1964.


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